


what i will say has cost me sleep

by daisyjohnsons



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Gen, Jemma Simmons Character Study, im sorry the relationships tag is a mess, its a jemma character study okay of course its a mess, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:26:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26204143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daisyjohnsons/pseuds/daisyjohnsons
Summary: Jemma Simmons used to be a girl with no room in her heart for hatred, just immeasurable space for the love that seemed to take over her entire being and consume her and others with its force. Her love was a weapon and she used it to protect the people she loved and her whole self was just love. Love for her work, love for her family, love for herself, and that love continues to exist but instead of simmering and gently warming, it now burns in a way that is so close to hatred, in a way that toes the line and grins at her in a way that looks like a baring of bloody teeth.or, a study in how jemma simmons uses her job to continue fighting
Relationships: Bobbi Morse & Jemma Simmons, Jemma Simmons & Antoine Triplett, Jemma Simmons & Skye | Daisy Johnson, Leo Fitz & Jemma Simmons, Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons, Lincoln Campbell & Jemma Simmons, Melinda May & Jemma Simmons, Phil Coulson & Jemma Simmons, Will Daniels/Jemma Simmons
Comments: 9
Kudos: 21





	what i will say has cost me sleep

**Author's Note:**

> okay tws because there's a few: drowning mention, minor wounds, implied ptsd, gunshot wound descriptions, basically the normal aos stuff
> 
> i promise i love jemma with my whole heart i just think her character is really interesting

Jemma Simmons wipes away the condensation in the bathroom mirror and smiles at her reflection. Her eyes are bright and she hasn’t looked this happy since she got her first PhD. 

She hasn’t been able to stop smiling since they saved Mike Peterson and it’s because it was her who saved him! _She_ saved him! It was her icer that stopped the reaction of the serum in his blood, so without her, he would’ve died! She proved herself to be an essential part of the team!

 _I did my job,_ she thinks, and then grins as the thought registers. “I did my job,” she says through her smile. “I did my job and I saved someone’s life.”

She says it, and her smile almost hurts her face. 

She says it, and not one doubt crosses her mind.

She says it, and she believes it.

  
  


Jemma doesn’t know how she’s keeping her voice steady. It hasn’t even shaken once since they found Skye, sharply contrasting with the unsteady beat of her heart and the non stop shaking of her hands. 

She supposes it’s because she has a job to do. 

She doesn’t know for sure. 

She doesn’t know _anything_ for sure, now. Her faith and her hope and her sureness hit a sharp decline the second she saw Skye leaning against the wall, pale and bloody and not breathing, since the fragile 11 seconds in which they waited, all as breathless as the girl in the chamber, for Skye to take a breath. 

Jemma can’t stop watching her breathe now. She is so scared that if she turns away for even a second, she’ll stop. 

But she has a job to do. 

She always has a job to do.

She doesn’t have to look at the team while giving her report, though. So she looks into the chamber and watches the way Skye’s chest rises and falls as she speaks.

“Her core temperature is hovering around 44 degrees fahrenheit. If we don’t bring her back up to temp in the next few hours, she could sustain permanent brain damage. We need to get her to a medical facility and fast. Until then, I’ll do everything I can to keep her alive.”

And there it is. The catch of her breath on the word _alive_ and break of her steadiness. _Alive_ . She has to keep Skye alive. She has to keep her alive because if she doesn’t then she loses her and if she doesn’t then they all lose her and she wasn’t even supposed to be a part of their team but she has become this irreplaceable and essential part of their _family_ and Jemma can’t think of her as anything but alive and yet here she is, _dying_ , and—

She has Skye’s blood on her hands.

Skye’s blood is drying on her hands.

(skye’s blood will be on her hands if jemma doesn’t _do her job_ )

Her heart drops into her stomach and she barely manages to mutter a small excuse before leaving the room at almost a run.

Fitz is the one to follow her, the one to take the gauze from her shaking hands, because of _course_ it’s him. She watches, shuddering softly, while he grabs medical grade wipes and uses them to clean her hands and it’s just like him to be the one to know exactly what she needs, to know that she needs the blood off her hands more than she needs a hug. He takes his time, handling the task as if it were one of his projects, careful to clean every nook and cranny of Jemma’s hands, even taking the time to clean under her fingernails.

“Fitz…” Jemma’s voice cracks and he shushes her softly, setting aside the wipes after one final inspection. He laces their fingers together and leans down to rest his forehead on hers. She is still shaking and she can feel it more intensely now that she has someone steady to compare herself to. “Fitz I can’t—Fitz, it’ll be my fault if she _dies_ and I can’t—”

“No, no. Jemma, no.” His voice is soft and it’s the only unsteady thing about him. “Jemma, it is not your fault.”

“I’m the one taking care of her, Fitz.” Her knees feel weak and her voice tremors and she slumps against Fitz’s chest, their hands between them. He tenses for a second, but then rests his head on hers and kisses the top of her head. 

“And I was her partner on the mission. I was supposed to take care of her. Instead, I hid under a car while she confronted Ian Quinn, that mother _fucker_.”

In any other situation, Jemma would’ve laughed at how foreign the word sounds coming from Fitz. In this situation, she holds back a sob.

“The only one to blame is him, Jemma. Skye will be fine, and if she’s not—” Fitz’s voice breaks and she feels him hide his face in her hair. “If she’s not, then we’ll keep going. We always keep going. That’s—”

“—the job,” Jemma finishes. She is almost scared by how empty her voice sounds. “That’s the job.”

  
  


When Jemma’s family falls apart, it's to the music of a cello.

She didn’t know it when the music was playing, but she calculated it when they arrived back at the base, when they found Agent Koenig’s body. While they were saving Audrey Nathan, May was leaving, Ward was murdering Agent Koenig, Skye was discovering his treachery, and the group she once called family was falling apart. 

The cello music is on repeat in her head now, background music for her despair. She can’t stop thinking about Ward. Ward, rolling his eyes and acting fondly annoyed when her and Fitz talked about anything he didn’t understand. Ward, diving out of a plane to save her. Ward, desperate and afraid when Skye almost died. Ward, Ward, Ward. 

She wonders how much of it was a lie. 

She wonders if he considered leaving Hydra for them, then she pinches herself for thinking that, but a small part of her brain wonders if it was her fault for not being worth staying and the tiny thought is deafening. 

It’s a habit of hers, unfortunately. Trying to make people happy. It makes sense in a way, that her first reaction to being betrayed is blaming herself. She hates that it makes sense and wishes it didn’t, but in these last few months, she’s learned wishing doesn’t do much.

She looks up from her hands when she hears a knock and sees Coulson. He’s standing at the door of the kitchen and his smile is a sad one as he looks down at her. She supposes her situation is a bit sad. She’s curled up in a ball in the corner of a kitchen of a hidden base in which one friend was killed and another was betrayed. But Coulson says, “mind if I join you?”, so Jemma’s situation is either not as sad as she thinks or it is and Coulson is just as sad as she is. It doesn’t really matter either way, so she pats the floor next to her. He sits down and they sit there for a bit, neither of them speaking, until they try and speak at the same time.

“How are you—”

“What are we—”

They both break off, glancing at each other out before bursting into laughter. 

“You first,” Jemma says in between laughs. 

Coulson’s smile is a bit less sad now. “I was just going to ask how you’re coping with all this. It’s pretty…”

“Fucked up?” 

Coulson startles, but he laughs softly, so Jemma doesn’t think she’s in much trouble for cursing. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s a pretty accurate description.” 

Jemma shrugs and leans back against the wall. “In all honesty, I’ve been better.”

A beat. “Yeah, same here.”

They sit. It’s a long silence, but it’s a comfortable one. It’s a time in which they’re sharing a deep emotion that only people who’ve been betrayed by a loved one can share, and it’s…. to Jemma, to say it’s nice is an understatement. It’s a reminder that she isn’t the only one hurting.

But as nice as the silence is, the pain is overwhelming and Jemma physically can’t stop thinking about Grant _fucking_ Ward.

“What do we do now, Jemma?” Coulson says and Jemma thinks he might cry. 

She takes a breath and reminds herself that she is sitting next to a man who has seen death.

“We do our job.”

  
  


She has a morning routine. It's not quite a job, and if it is, it's one she owes herself. It is a time when she's not Dr. Simmons and when she's not Agent Simmons, just Jemma Simmons. She runs a mile or two on her treadmill, showers and blow dries her hair and does her makeup and walks out the door with a travel mug of chamomile tea in her hand. 

It makes life easier.

Almost makes life easy enough to forget the handgun in her purse and the nights she's spent practicing pulling it out and pointing it, how long she's spent holding it up and staying like that, making sure her hands don't shake. 

Almost makes life easy enough to forget the walking heartache of a boy she left behind, the boy who was— no, _is_ her best friend. 

The one she's doing this for. 

She practices pulling her gun because one day her cover will fall and she will have to defend herself to make sure she can get home and see Fitz’s beautiful blue eyes again, to make sure she can get home and tell him she's so so sorry for leaving but she _had_ to because he wasn't getting better and he was only hurt because he sacrificed himself for her and it was her fault for not getting him to the surface faster.

Her hands are scraped and her arms ache, but her hands don’t shake anymore. She almost feels like someone who can save herself.

She is saved by someone else anyways, so what was the point?

Fitz won’t look her in the eyes, so what was the _point_?

She did the job, though, so she thinks she’s okay. For now, she is okay.

  
  


Antoine Tripplett dies. 

He dies alone, in a wasted effort to save a friend who didn't need saving. 

Coulson, with his head in his hands, mutters, “Tripp would still be alive if I had just _done my job_.”

Simmons spends a month in the tunnels.

She does her job, and it only makes things worse.

  
  


On the other planet, Jemma does her best to stay alive. It is a job she owes herself, and one she owes the people she (unwillingly) left behind. 

It is a test, she thinks. The universe is testing her to see if she can actually save herself, to see if she can be the hero of her own story, and for a while, she is! She kills a plant creature and she makes her own weapons and keeps herself occupied and she’s by herself, but a silver lining in being by yourself is that no one else can be the hero of your story.

Then, she falls into Will. Quite literally.

He’s been there for fourteen years, doing nothing more than staying alive, and his face has lost its color and she thinks, _this, this is someone I can help_. 

She thinks she helped him. He smiled more with her. She gave him hope, and he kept her alive. It was a decently fair trade. Then, he pushed her to the portal and to Fitz and he only hesitated for a second and that second was how Jemma knew he loved her.

It is another heartbreak. She is so, so tired of heartbreak. 

  
  


Will dies. She isn’t there to see it, but when Fitz cries against her chest, apologizing over and over again because he wanted to save someone she cared about and he couldn’t, because he had to be the one to deliver the news that Will died saving her, she feels like she was. 

She honestly doesn’t know why she continues to let herself get attached. Getting attached isn’t in the job description; if anything, it interferes with the job. But she can’t do her job without the people she cares about, so she gives herself a new job: 

Keep them safe. Keep them _alive_.

  
  


Almost a year after the fact, Jemma’s chest still aches with the gaping hole Tripp left. 

Lincoln tells her that he shouldn't have died. He says that people without the inhuman gene don't turn to stone when passing through the mist, that Jiaying’s crystals had to be modified in order to be lethal to those without the inhuman gene and Jemma remembers that she found pieces of Tripp with terrigen crystals embedded in the rock. 

And she realizes. 

Tripp died because he thought breaking the crystals would save Skye. 

He died for _nothing_.

(she considers carrying the weight that information put on her shoulders her most important job, because daisy can _never_ know)

Jemma’s chest _burns._

  
  


Melinda May carries the world on her shoulders and not once has Jemma seen her back bend under the weight of it. In the days after May finds her in the firing range, Jemma sees her staring at her. It’s not uncommon for May to stare at people, either in judgement or because her mind has floated to a far off place and she isn’t seeing the one she’s staring at anymore, but Jemma feels like she’s staring _through_ her.

(little does she know, may looks at jemma and feels like she’s staring at a mirror)

May finds her pacing the halls at almost three in the morning and she nods her head towards the training room and Jemma knows only a fool wouldn’t follow her.

“Hit me,” May orders and Jemma hesitates. In that second, May lashes out and Jemma weakly blocks her but there’s a smile on May’s face that looks something like amusement. “It’s a start. Now, hit me, or I hit you.”

Jemma does and May corrects her. Jemma does it with May’s corrections, and May hits back. They fall into a pattern, hit and dodge, hit and block, hit and correct. It’s the best Jemma’s felt since May told them that Lash killed the twelve inhumans, the smallest the pit in her stomach has felt. 

After an hour or maybe two, time doesn’t mean much to Jemma anymore. (Dr. Gardner said it was more than likely the trauma of remembering how she counted each hour she spent on the other planet), May says Jemma needs a break. They sit together and Jemma is reminded of how she also sat against a wall with Coulson and it’s almost ironic, that she’s once again sitting with someone who’s like a parent to her when she feels like she’s hit rock bottom.

“Why did you learn to fight?” Jemma asks, not sure why.

May is silent and Jemma thinks she’s going to ignore her question, but then she says, “it was the only way to not drown.”

Jemma doesn’t know what she means, but she looks down at her hands and sees fresh bruises and old scars and her chest burns, because she hasn’t received a wound Will hasn’t tended to in so long. It’s the feeling of cold tears on her cheeks that ignites the fire in her chest and her sobs hurt her throat. May pulls her close, her arms just as strong as they look, and Jemma hears a small murmur of, “ _I know_ ,” and Jemma knows what she meant, because struggling to breathe through her tears _does_ feel like drowning. Jemma would know. 

Jemma cries in May’s arms and it feels like the world is ending, and she thinks she sees a curve in May’s spine.

She closes her eyes.

  
  


Bobbi Morse is a walking heartbreak and Jemma is so helpless, she almost _wants_ Bobbi to break her heart. She’s approximately twenty centimeters taller than Jemma and Jemma pretends that it doesn’t make her heart skip a beat and she ignores the effort she put into finding that little fact out. It’s not fair to poor Fitz, however it is absolutely _hilarious_ when Fitz frowns up at Bobbi and Jemma watches as Bobbi simply smirks like she knows she could crush him. 

Logically, Jemma knows they’re too much alike to work out as a couple, and she has Hunter, so why would she ever need Jemma, but sometimes she thinks it would be nice to simply kiss her for an hour or two. Maybe three. Maybe more. Then she makes herself stop thinking.

Bobbi Morse is a walking heartbreak, and Jemma should’ve known that any feelings for her would lead to pain, but she is dragged along anyways and she stands by and watches as she is carried into the lab on a stretcher, bleeding out through a bullet wound she dived in front of Hunter to take. She stands by and watches her borderline torture herself trying to help Jemma and Fitz and herself at the same time after Jemma returns from the other planet. She stands by and hears Coulson say that Bobbi and Hunter have to leave and there’s nothing any of them can do about it. She closes her eyes and hears the inevitable break of her heart as the liquor goes down her throat.

Bobbi is tall and she is strong and she is beautiful and she sacrificed everything in order to do the job. Jemma wishes she could be like her. 

  
  


Another year. Jemma’s chest no longer burns, but it is heavy. She doesn’t see Lincoln die, but she watches as the Quinjet disappears from the radar, and it feels the same. She clings to Fitz and she hides her face in his shirt but she can’t cover her ears and all she can hear is Daisy sobbing, crying so loudly and with such despair that it almost sounds like screaming. 

Lincoln did the job, she thinks. He did the job and he saved them all and it cost him his life. 

  
  


Jemma paces the halls of the base at night, now. She waits until Fitz falls asleep, as to not worry him. He knows she does it, he just doesn’t know how often. It’s just that her thoughts move so quickly and they move without mercy and she has _so_ much to think about. 

She uses the night and the silence to think about things that are too painful to say out loud. 

She thinks about Tripp and how he treated her like someone to be respected from the start. She was so used to being treated as just another part of Fitz, she’d forgotten that on her own, she still had two PhDs and was more intelligent and talented than most of the people she knew. She owes it to Tripp that she recognized that about herself. She never thanked him for it.

She thinks about Will, about his touch, about the hope he gave her even when she was supposed to be the optimist. She thinks she loved him, but she knows very well that anything can seem like love when goodness is so rare. 

She thinks about Lincoln, thinks about how she's known so many good people and loved so many good people and how she was beginning to think of him as family. He sacrificed himself for them. She is alive because he is not. 

She thinks about— 

“Daisy…”

And there she is, a physical manifestation of the tear in Jemma’s heart. She turns around and looks at Jemma and her eyes are so full of pain, it makes Jemma ache. “Jemma. Please, don’t try and stop me.”

She’s leaving, Jemma realizes, for what looks like a very long time. 

“Why?” 

Daisy hesitates. It hurts more than if she hadn't, because now Jemma knows that at least a small part of her _wants_ to stay. 

“I won't stop you. Not unless you ask me to.” _Please, ask me to._ “I just want to know why.”

Daisy scoffs and there are tears in her eyes. “Isn't it obvious?” Jemma stays silent. “I see him _everywhere_ . When I go to sleep, I remember using his chest as a pillow. When I’m training, I remember him letting me pin him in order to sneak a kiss. When I use the comms I remember him—” her voice cracks and Jemma rubs her thumb against her fingers because if she doesn’t keep her hands occupied, she won’t be able to stop herself from running to her and pulling her into her arms and holding her, holding her and keeping her steady, keeping her steady and sitting with the girl with the power to shake the earth in a small circle of peace amidst the chaos their lives have become. “I remember him telling me he loves me. _Loved_ me. I remember that I didn’t get to say it back. Jemma, please. I can’t stay here. I can’t just suck it up and hold it in and do the job anymore.”

(this, this moment is when she breaks)

“ _Daisy._ ” Jemma’s voice is a near whimper and her words are so, so fragile and desperate. “Daisy, we need you.”

“Don't do that, Jemma,” Daisy says and her voice cracks when she says Jemma's name. The anger on her face looks forced, but it is still there. “Please.”

“I seem to recall you saying that exact thing to me, once. Honestly I don’t know why you’re mad! Because we do,” Jemma says hotly. “And unless I'm somehow mistaken, you need us too.”

The next thing she knows, her back is against the wall and Daisy is so, so close, but her eyes are so far away. “Don't you _dare_ tell me what I need.”

“What do you need, then?” Daisy doesn't break eye contact. “Daisy, what do you _want_?” Daisy glances down and it might be wishful thinking, but Jemma thinks she's looking at her lips. Daisy stays silent and doesn't move, though, so Jemma closes her eyes and leans her head back against the wall, relying on Daisy’s hands on her shoulders to keep her upright.

There's a quick press of lips against hers, harsh, lingering, and then gone. 

Jemma opens her eyes and there's nothing but an empty hallway and the already faint memory of Daisy’s kiss. 

  
  


Jemma stares at her reflection in the mirror and she thinks of the friends she’s lost.

First, Grant Ward. Never really her friend in the first place, at least not to him. She cared for him, though, and she lost him. She knew she was losing him when she was performing an autopsy on someone when the only plausible murder suspect was him, but she well and truly lost him when he pressed the eject button on the pod and dropped her and Fitz into the ocean, and made eye contact with her while he did it. 

She honestly wished that she’d had the chance to shoot the real Ward. Not that shooting Hive wasn’t satisfying. It was all too satisfying. She thinks it haunts her, on the nights when she dreams of holding Will in her arms and floating without a care in the world, when those dreams of light and happiness turn dark as the skies rain blood and she realizes it’s not the skies, but Will, as he bleeds from bullet wounds in his gut and looks at her with an expression of complete and utter betrayal. 

_I was doing my job_ , she thinks, as she wipes the condensation from the glass. Her eye bags are dark and heavy, and she tries to remember how bright her eyes once were. She thinks they were brighter when she met Tripp. A darker part of herself is glad he didn’t live to see that brightness leave her.

Antoine Tripplet was the second friend she lost. Christ’s sake, she’d picked up the broken pieces of his body and put them in a _fucking_ wheelbarrow. It stayed with her for months afterwards, in the forms of dreams where Tripp was smiling and laughing, and reaching for her, panic in his eyes as that same smile turns to stone and he cracks apart until Jemma is holding him in her arms once again. 

_He died for then-Skye-now-Daisy,_ she thinks. _He’s almost certainly happy about that_. 

She hopes he’s happy. She wishes he’d gotten the chance to be happy with her for a little longer. But he did his job. He protected his partner the only way he knew how, and isn’t that exactly what S.H.I.E.L.D. does?

The next to go were Bobbi and Hunter. Bobbi Morse and Lance Hunter. Two of the most hurtful losses, and they weren’t even taken by death. They left and spared the rest of them. They did their jobs, they did the right thing.

Or did they? Did they do the job, or did they get off the Titanic before it’s inevitable descent into the abyss? 

She doesn’t know.

She misses them, though. She wishes she had more time with them. She wishes she’d gotten to kiss Bobbi more than once. But if they left a ship doomed for destruction before it was too late, she can’t blame them. 

(she almost wishes they took her with them)

Losing Will is what made her begin to lose faith. She already had doubts, but Fitz’s tears on her sweater only solidified them. Made them real. Holding him in her arms and trying to hide her own tears manifested her doubts in the worst way possible. She did her job on that planet. She kept herself safe and she got herself home. And she left someone behind. She let yet another person die for her. Just another life she traded for her own. 

The wonderful dreams of Will are almost as painful as the nightmares, if not more so. It’s usually just them talking, kidding around, occasionally kissing, but always happy. 

They always take place in the evening. 

She never knew why, until she realized it’s because she never saw his face in true sunlight. She locked herself in the bathroom and sat under freezing cold water until she was shaking violently the second she realized.

She loves Fitz, she thinks. But she loved Will too. She thinks that’s okay.

Lincoln was the last straw. Not just because of his death, but because his death led to her losing Daisy and Jemma associates the two losses with each other, because they truly were two halves of a whole. Daisy’s back, technically, but in the way losing Lincoln tore a hole in the team, it tore Daisy in half and left nothing for her to use to repair herself. She’s here, but she’s a shadow of herself.

Jemma misses her and it hurts so much more to miss someone that is here than it is to miss someone that is gone. 

Lincoln was her friend. In fact, he was more than that. He almost felt like a reflection of herself. They had in common biology, determination, love for people with their hearts on their sleeves, and a willingness to cut the world down to their principles and standards, no matter the cost.

She sees him in dreams, too. In them, he is so powerful and his eyes glow blue like fire and sparks rain down around him, but when she holds out a hand that is for some reason still glowing gold, he takes it, sparks fading— no, not fading. His eyes glow brighter and she knows where those sparks went (she holds a similar place in her chest where she stores her power). He takes her hand and is bathed in gold, the golden boy returning to himself, and he is happy and he is loved. 

Her love exists in dreams and she doesn’t know why but a voice whispers that it’s the only place the evil in the world can’t touch it and she _hates_ it. 

Jemma Simmons used to be a girl with no room in her heart for hatred, just immeasurable space for the love that seemed to take over her entire being and consume her and others with its force. Her love was a weapon and she used it to protect the people she loved and her whole self was just _love_ . Love for her work, love for her family, love for herself, and that love continues to exist but instead of simmering and gently warming, it now burns in a way that is so _close_ to hatred, in a way that toes the line and grins at her in a way that looks like a baring of bloody teeth. Her hatred is her weapon and it is an armory and holding it inside _hurts_ , but she doesn’t have a choice. Letting it out means hurting the people she loves, whether it be directly or indirectly, and then she fails them. Fails herself. Fails at her job. Again. 

She slides down against the bathroom door and looks at the ceiling and it’s a mantra that she repeats to herself, hoping that maybe after a few more times, she’ll believe it.

“ _It’s the job. It’s the price we have to pay. We do our jobs or people die. It’s the price_ I _have to pay_.”

Maybe, one day, she’ll believe it. 

**Author's Note:**

> hiiiiii :D if u want to yell at me pls feel free to in the comments or on twitter @ isabelovelace !!! also shout out to kels for letting me send too many snippets hiiii kels if ur reading this ilysm <3


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